Salkilld submits Gamrot in 4:25: UFC Fight Night results

That was a card about arithmetic, and the arithmetic was ugly for anyone who still buys fights with their eyes. Eleven of the twelve bouts at the Meta Apex ended the way the betting market said they would, five of them inside the first round, and the two headline "upsets" were not upsets at all. They were the favorites winning.

Quillan Salkilld submitted Mateusz Gamrot at 4:25 of the first round, which is the sort of sentence you write about a lightweight prospect once and then spend two years apologizing for underrating. He is 26, he is 13-1, and he has now finished five of his six UFC opponents in the first round.

Photo: Roger Gor / CC BY 3.0

I should say up front where I landed. Our model gave Gamrot 39 percent and I still picked him, because I have watched him drag better wrestlers than Salkilld into deep water for four years. The model was right and I was wrong, and it is worth being precise about how right: across the twelve graded bouts the model went 10 for 12, and the closing market went 11 for 12. The market beat us by one fight, a strawweight coinflip we had at 50.7 percent. I would rather print that than pretend otherwise.

On to the rest of it.

Salkilld did it with wrestling, which is the part that should scare the division. Gamrot has landed 5.22 takedowns per fifteen minutes across his UFC career and defends at 83 percent. Salkilld went one for one, held 2:02 of control to Gamrot's 20 seconds, and out-landed him 10 significant strikes to 3 before the choke. Nobody out-grapples Gamrot for a full round. Salkilld did not need one. Friday I wrote a breakdown of how you out-wrestle a 26-fight wrestler, and the answer turned out to be that you do not bother out-wrestling him, you just take his back.

Gamrot at 35 is now 2-3 in his last five, with losses to Charles Oliveira, Dan Hooker and now a man who was ranked four spots below him. He was No. 8 at lightweight going in. He will not be No. 8 on Tuesday. There is no shame in the loss and there is also no soft landing at the top of that division, which is the cruelest thing about lightweight right now.

Yadier del Valle needed 35 seconds and six punches. He landed five of them, one of which put Darren Elkins down, and that was the fight. Elkins attempted two significant strikes and landed none. He is 42 years old, he has now been stopped in the first round in two of his last three, and I do not want to write the next sentence, so I will let our numbers write it instead: two days before this card we published a study of when fighters get washed, and the finding was that age plus accumulated knockdowns, not miles or minutes, is what predicts the cliff. Elkins has been the sport's most stubborn survivor for a decade. I hope somebody he trusts has the conversation with him.

Alexia Thainara beat Amanda Lemos so thoroughly that the scorecards understate it. 7:43 of control time, 81 significant strikes to 56, two takedowns from six attempts. Thainara was ranked No. 12 to Lemos' No. 8 and was a 73 percent favorite on the board, which tells you what the ranking panel has not yet noticed. Lemos is 39 and has lost three in a row. Thainara is 15-1.

Diego Ferreira and Billy Quarantillo had the best fight and I am glad the judges never had to explain themselves. 189 combined significant strikes, Ferreira ahead 116 to 73, four takedowns, unanimous decision, Fight of the Night. Ferreira is 41, in his 18th UFC fight, and just collected the ninth post-fight bonus of his career. He does not headline anything again. He also does not need to.

Ty Miller is 2-0 in the UFC with two Performance bonuses, this one a third-round stoppage of Billy Ray Goff at 0:15. Two fights, two checks. That is a rate the promotion notices.

The prelims held serve almost perfectly. Diyar Nurgozhay stopped Bruno Lopes with one second left in the first, Miles Johns got Gianni Vazquez out in 3:09 after his original opponent fell out, and Juliana Miller submitted Ravena Oliveira in the second. The board lost exactly one fight all night: Jose Montanha choked out Louie Sutherland in 1:50 as a 34 percent underdog, and that is the bout where the model and the market were wrong together. Our extra miss was Carol Foro over GiGi Canuto, a decision the books had priced correctly and we had as a coinflip.

Full results, per-round numbers and the bonus board are on the event page.

The division does not have room to be polite about this. Salkilld has beaten Beneil Dariush and Gamrot in his last two, both inside a round, and the names above him are all busy losing to each other. Give him someone in the top five in November, or admit the rankings are decorative.

Which, after Saturday, they mostly are.